PS5s
This publication was updated on 7.18.2020
Things got crazy earlier in the week. A rumor that Sony was going to open PS5 pre-orders by announcing the price and release date gained some steam, and there was a time when we really thought it was going to happen: sooner or later Sony has to tell us how much! this costs! But this turned out to be a failure, and Geoff Keighley asked PlayStation Global Marketing Chief Ed Lempel in an interview about the Dualsense controller today.
“No, definitely not now. We don’t know what happened there, we have nothing to do with it, “he said of the rumor.
“I think it’s safe to say: we will let you know when the pre-order will occur. It will not happen in a matter of minutes. At some point we will let you know when you can pre-order a PlayStation 5, so please don’t feel like you have to run out of things and go to line anywhere. ”
So it’s a relief: when preorders are opened it won’t be a surprise. Sony naturally wants as much publicity as possible, and it’s also easy to imagine a situation where confusion and chaos reign in the wake of a surprise announcement. As fun as it was to imagine that it was actually going to happen earlier in the week, we can expect more choreography on this front.
The next big punctuation mark in this burgeoning console war is Microsoft’s big game showcase next Thursday, although Microsoft would rather stop referring to all of this as a console war. That’s when we’re going to see more about Halo: Infinity as well as anything else that Microsoft has prepared for the games of the first years in the coming years: there is news of Perfect dark restart, and that would be amazing.
And yet, despite the dance of game exclusives and revelations, price remains by far the biggest question here. That’s why preorders can take a while to activate, because you can’t exactly open preorders without telling people how much a thing costs. And according to all external accounts, Microsoft and Sony seem to be caught up in a chicken game, they both hope to learn something about each other’s plans before making their own announcements. We have already passed the point where we would have expected to have this information: the last generation we discovered it at E3, but this year COVID-19 means there is no E3.
Most still expect these consoles to live somewhere near $ 499, but there are some tricky factors in the mix. On the PlayStation side, we have the all-digital and disk drive editions, with most expecting a $ 50 price differential between the two. On the Xbox side, we still look forward to hearing about Project Lockhart, a less powerful console that could be dramatically lower priced, completely changing the conversation about access to next-gen console games.
Sony is reportedly increasing its initial production of PS5 after an explosion of interest in gaming due to COVID-19 crashes, so it appears to be raising its expectations about what’s possible here. But ultimately, we’re not going to have a great idea of where these things are going to land until either company drops to a firm price and opens pre-orders. Stay tuned for more, as it comes.
